Perverted truth: How rebel mourning MH17 victims was turned into looter with trophy

A member of the self-defense forces holds up a stuffed animal as others look on at the site of the crash of a Malaysian airliner carrying 298 people from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in Grabove, in east Ukraine, on July 18, 2014. (AFP Photo / Dominique Faget)

Twitter is quick, but too quick sometimes – recently it burst with photos of an evil Ukrainian militiaman who took a teddy bear from the victim of Malaysia plane crash as a trophy. But the full video shows he was just paying the tribute to the dead.

“Pro Russian holds up stuffed toy like trophy. Mr
@PutinRF_Eng, are you proud of your compatriots?" wrote a
twitter user John Gosling.

A photo signed “pro-Russian fighter holds up a toy found
among the debris at the crash site of MH17” has been used by
such major media outlets as the BBC and NBC. Some outlets went as
far as to say that ‘pro-Russian fighters’ were collecting the
belongings of passengers of the doomed Malaysia Airlines MH17
flight.

What really happened?

In reality, the photo was taken during a visit of 30 OSCE
international observers who arrived at the scene of the crashed
plane to investigate the area. Among the OSCE group were the
members of self-defense forces in Donetsk region who accompanied
them.

The footage shows that one of the members of self-defense troops
suddenly saw a teddy bear which apparently belonged to a child
who was among the 298 passenger on board the Malaysian jet.

“We want those bastards to see whom they shot down,” the man
said, “Do you see?” meaning that there were innocent
children who died in the crash.

Then he carefully put the toy back to a heap of other items that
used to belong to the passengers. After that he took off his cap
and marked himself with a sign of the cross paying the tribute to
the memory of the victims of the catastrophe.

The MH17 flight crash site is a vast territory, from 10 to 50
square kilometers according to various sources, as the Malaysia
Airlines Boeing 777 came apart kilometers above the surface and
the debris rained down on the fields around the village of
Grabovo.

That explains why Donetsk People’s Republic emergency services
opted to collect the located belongings of the passengers from
the territory and bring them to one spot. If not taken to a
single place, they could be lost later, as mapping such a huge
number of fragments and items appears to be a monumental task.

Though international expert community insisted on not touching
the bodies, after several days of waiting in vain, when no
international experts managed to leave Kiev to see the crash
site, where daily temperature reached +30 Celsius, the
self-defense forces opted to collect the decomposing bodies and
loaded them on to a refrigerated train.

Now that first Dutch forensic experts – first international
investigators - have arrived in eastern Ukraine to assess the
aftermath of the Malaysian plane crash, they will finally get a
first glimpse on the crash site and probably share their
preliminary findings with the media.